Alibaba overtakes Walmart to be world's largest retailer

Chinese e-commerce major Alibaba overtook America's Walmart to be world's largest retailer, according to Stationery News.

Alibaba Group Holdings said that as of 31 March it has “become the largest retail economy in the world as measured by annual gross merchandise volume (GMV) on its China retail marketplaces.”

According to the report, a fortnight ago, Alibaba's executive vice chairman Joe Tsai said that with 10 days remaining to its year to march, Alibaba's China retail marketplace platforms had surpassed RMB3 trillion in GMV.

The company is yet to release its trading figures for the year 2016. 

A recent ranking by Investopedia shows that WalMart, founded in 1945, generated an annual worldwide revenue of $485.7 billion in 2015, making it last year's biggest retailer.

In a China Daily report, the Alibaba group said that it "used 13 years to demonstrate the power of a different business model compared with brick-and-mortar retailers."

Alibaba CEO Jonathan Lu also said in a CNBC report that "the company expects to triple the volume of transactions on its marketplaces to about 3 trillion yuan or $490 billion by 2016, overtaking Wal-Mart as the world's biggest retail network."

Looks like Alibaba's wish has fulfilled as in a 2014 Forbes report, founder Jack Ma had shared that his group "wants to be bigger than Walmart"